Max and Nico took their seats in the eting with the military leaders, who all looked much more nervous than the situation called for. Max already knew what they had to say, and if he were actually mad, this wouldn't be such a cordial eting.
But to subordinates who were suddenly called in a large group to talk to the big boss, it was hard to get past that ingrained feeling that you might have ssed sothing up that you hadn't noticed before he did.
"Who wants to start? Rember that I can read your minds, so this is mostly a formality to get everyone on the sa page and brainstorm solutions." Max reminded them.
That helped calm the Officers, and the first to stand was the leader of the third Battalion.
"We encountered so difficulty with piracy when making one of our deliveries. My Battalion had a talk with the Black Market, and they assured us that it wasn't sanctioned by them, but we have delayed their next shipnt by a week as a punishnt for giving others the impression that they might be willing to purchase goods stolen from us.
The details are all here in my report."
That was pretty straightforward and proper for a Reaver response to an untrustworthy trading partner, and nobody in the room had any issue with it.
"That's fine. They will get the ssage." Max agreed.
Then, he searched the minds of the people on the ship. There were a lot of Black Market-operated businesses here, so they should know about the situation.
It only took a few seconds to find the real answer. One of the underlings thought that he could pull a fast one on the boss, and once the Pirates had been eliminated and the Black Market sanctioned for a week, the bosses did an intensive search for traitors and purged him and everyone he was working with.
In short, the problem was well and truly taken care of.
The next few notices were just mundane business, and everything seed to be under control for most of their business operations, with the exception of the Industrial Equipnt sector, which sold a lot of demilitarized Line cha for comrcial use and had attracted the attention of the Alliance Governnt again.
The Envoys on the ship were looking into it, but Max checked the records, and nothing that they had shipped had any armour or weapons on it. They didn't even sell the mining attachnts preassembled with the chassis. Those had to be sourced separately.
While they were going through the minute details of the daily operations, reiterating the details that they had given the Council, a ssage ca in on the Koleska frequencies.
[Attention all ard and capable beings of the Universe, the Great Enemy has attacked the Rift, and you are called upon to defend your very existence.
Should the Great Enemy make it through the blockade, they will have free access to your howorlds.
We will assemble in one standard day.]
The ssage wasn't from the Koleska. It was to them and coded as having co from the Darklings. The code wouldn't an anything to most species, but Max recognized it from interacting with their systems in the past.
If the Darklings were calling all intelligent species to defend the rift, as they called the giant area of destroyed space between where the Anomaly the Hunters had been defending and the one where the Koleska lived, it could only an that whatever had taken the planet and destroyed the Anomaly was headed toward the majority of civilized species in that region.
Max and Nico looked around the room, and then Max paged the Board mbers to co to him. They were nearby, likely in the offices, so he added a note to bring the Envoys from the Alliance with them as well.
Everyone would need to understand just what was going on, and most of them didn't have all the details about what had happened to the world that the Hunters had been protecting yet.
That was confidential and held within the Alliance military, so it wouldn't have been spread to the politicians yet.
The room fell silent while they waited for the rest of the guests to arrive, but everyone was thinking the sa thing. What had happened that would make soone request every single intelligent species to co and intervene in so massive-scale battle?
As a matter of fact, what sort of enemy could possibly be so dangerous and so nurous that it would take a force that large to control them?
More details were slowly leaking in from the Koleska and Commander Yuri, who saw to it that he personally kept Max in the loop with every new developnt even after Max had left to help the Hunters.
From what the Koleska could tell, there were millions of warships headed toward the rift, which was currently fluctuating with energy, as if a massive battle were taking place inside the damaged space.
That was certainly not good news, and the Koleska had sent a full third of their military might to assist their allies at the battle.
That was as much or more than any of the others had sent, so they couldn't be accused of holding back in a ti of need, and they had sent their most advanced troops, the new generation trained with the learning machines that the humans had provided them.
Then a ssage ca from the Cygnus Commanders, requesting an opinion from the Reavers and the Alliance on whether it was appropriate to send the force on that side of the Anomaly to the battle, with the Cygnus Military units on the human side reinforcing the Anomaly until the battle was settled.
They had a thousand Titan Class cha there, along with fifty Destroyers. It was a fleet on par with most of the species that were called to arms, and their Koleska allies would need all the help they could get if this so-called Great Enemy could actually make it past the Rift.
Reviews
All reviews (0)